This will be a seres of posts about “how to make machinima in virtual Worlds”. This one is about the software glitches that you may encounter in the virtual world.We found some special glitches in SL that we had to overcome in the filming:

local Lights

When using local lights for the indoor sets (set SL to midnight) I found that they don’t always work. It seems (according to the LSL-Wiki) that we can only use 6 objects with local light (including face lights) and that the light will disappear when the avatar (the one who is filming) is not close to the objects. So if I moved my avatar to another room, the lights in the room where I wanted to shoot, did not work.

As a workaround, I just selected the light objects for editing, which turned on the lights again, but only as long as I kept the edit window open and the objects selected. That is not optimal if I need to move my camera around. Another approach will be to move my avatar into the center of the actual set and try to hide it from the camera.
Missing Images

One time, I could not see the clothing (just “missing image”) that I put on my avatar in the other viewer (the viewer I used for filming). Relog and clearing the cache did not help. I solved the problem by using another suit because we did not do any shooting for that scene before, so it was not a problem to put on another suit here.

Maybe a better workaround would be to change the viewer accounts next time. I was filming as Jim2 but needed the avatar outfit for Jim. The clothing looked fine if I was logged in as Jim on the other machine, so maybe next time I can just switch machines to overcome the problem. But this will only work if I act as myself and do the filming at the same time. This is not always possible.